20 Sep Does it Ever End? Feng Shui Forever

When we moved into our house 17 years ago, we made our dining room a music room.  I came with a grand piano in tow and that was the best place to put it.  Re-defining a room from one purpose to another requires some purposeful Feng Shui intentions, but the space seemed to accommodate this dining-room-to-music-room shift. Eight years ago, I sold my piano and the room returned to being a dining room.  We’ve enjoyed serving dinners in there and, I must say, the space felt relieved to be brought back to its original intention.  But about a year ago it began to feel as though it was, well, tired.  So now we’re getting rid of the current furniture to be replaced by something more stylish.  The wall color is changing, the chandelier is changing, and a china cabinet has already been removed.

Along the same lines, my husband has been perfecting our back hill for over ten years — putting in flowers, a fountain, fairy houses, and Feng Shui principles.  The garden came alive under his hands and continued to be a source of immense solace and restoration to us every summer, and even through the winter.  A couple years ago he was guided to put a path across the hill which added even more allure to the backyard experience.  This year, again, he was called to make a change—so an additional path was added.

So what happens when the perfect Feng Shui becomes less than perfect and you make a change?  It’s clear that even though you’ve incorporated Feng Shui, it doesn’t mean that’s the final word and you will never have to address the particular area again.

1.  If you watch nature, you will see that it is always changing.  We may not like it, but winter comes each year.  The flowers bloom and then die; the trees drop their leaves.  This is the natural order of change.  Your own personal space, if truly a living space, will do the same thing.

2.  It isn’t just enough to change things, but there’s always an unspoken intention that the change will be better.  Just as the seasons pass each year, we consider ourselves wiser and more aware, more “seasoned,”  the changes in our space should also wind themselves spiral up as part of the natural progression.  The new furniture will be better than the old; this color is more fashionable that what we had; this new arrangement will be better suited to the light coming in.  The change is typically viewed as an improvement.

3.  Subscribing to the basic Feng Shui premise that our life is mirrored in the space in which we live, as we make a change in our lives, the space will make a corresponding change.  Knowingly or unknowingly, we make changes in our lives all the time—not only through our physical appearance (hair, weight, clothes) but also through our internal system (beliefs, feelings, thoughts).  The space will follow a similar path, subtly or dramatically.

4.  Finally, subscribing to the same version of the premise above (our life is a mirror of our space), our space is a mirror of our lives.  We sense that we need some kind of change to happen in our lives, perhaps subconsciously, so we change something in our space to correspond to this change.  In order to keep up with our space, our own life changes unfold as well.

The bottom line is that as long as we are alive we are never done with Feng Shui.  Our Feng Shui will only be perfect for a while and then we look for a different perfect.  This on-going process is what keeps us vibrant and alive and always looking for the next thing.